Juncker: veteran EU insider
(BRUSSELS) - Jean-Claude Juncker, approved by the European Parliament Tuesday to head the European Commission, is a veteran EU insider versed in the art of getting things done in the labyrinth of the bloc.
Riding out fierce last-ditch British opposition, Juncker won overwhelming support from EU leaders at a summit in June and was in confident mood addressing MEPs Tuesday, fending off brickbats from British and French eurosceptics with ease and his trademark dry humour.
Needing a minimum 376 votes out of the 751 MEPs, Juncker won approval with 422, backed by his own centre-right European People's Party and the centre-left Socialists, the two largest groups in parliament.
Juncker, the son of a metal worker, led tiny Luxembourg for 19 years to make him the longest serving EU leader.
However, he really made his mark in Brussels during the eurozone debt crisis when he was head of the Eurogroup of finance ministers for eight years up to 2013.
The 59-year-old was at the centre of the storm, helping steer the single currency bloc through a crisis which very nearly wrecked it.
"The euro protects Europe," Juncker told MEPs in a pre-ballot speech outlining his vision for the future.
He was a key figure in negotiating the hardline programmes imposed in return for EU and International Monetary Fund debt bailouts in Greece, Ireland and Portugal.
Those programmes, marked by sharp cuts in government spending and a massive spike in unemployment, proved hugely unpopular and Juncker was roundly criticised by many for killing the patient with the harsh austerity medicine.
But he was quick too to back a change of tack to focus more on growth once the crisis eased from late 2012.
- 'Fatal flaws' -
Juncker is well known for his ability to reconcile the often sharply differing views of France and Germany, the bloc's top two economies, in order to get essential agreements during the crisis.
"When I want to speak in French, I think in German; when I want to speak in German, I think in French, with the result that I am totally incomprehensible," he once joked.
He has "two fatal flaws -- he has an opinion and he is not afraid to share it," said one European official.
Juncker was born in 1954 in a Europe still struggling to rise from the wreckage of World War II, when his father was press-ganged into the German army.
His father was a strong influence, not least for his experiences as a metal worker and union member.
A smoker with a taste for the finer things in life -- particularly cognac -- Juncker holds firmly to the political right and sees the EU as offering a continent marked by hundreds of years of war the best way forward.
But true to his form as a pragmatic operator, he is also suspicious of the idea that free market economics can solve all problems.
"Juncker, he is the most socialist Christian Democrat there is," longtime Greens leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit once said of his longstanding foe.